4 KEPW programs explore the darkness of the season

Presenter: Four KEPW programs came together to collaboratively explore the growing darkness. Here is the Samhain edition of KEPW’s Underground Echo:

Echo: This is Underground Echo. I’m here with the incredible—

Nova K: Nova K.

Echo: And tonight we are digging into the forgotten history of Springfield’s Pioneer Memorial Cemetery Park. Welcome to the human stories behind the mysteries.

Nova, when we first walked into Cemetery Park, there was something unsettling about seeing those old headstones surrounded by like an otherwise ordinary neighborhood.

Nova K: I don’t know. But when we went to the park, it was surrounded by deer.

Echo: Yeah, yeah.

Nova K: I saw six deer surrounding the entire area, and deer are known for the dead and carry ’em through the afterlife.

Echo: Yeah. How many, how many deer did you see? Six?

Nova K: Six.

Echo: Wow.

Nova K: One of them having strange horns.

Echo: My vibe is that there’s a lot of strong energy here now folks. We’re standing in a place where generations of people once buried their loved ones, and now it’s a public park.

Like when we rolled up here, it’s creepy. I’ll give it that. It’s like a creepy little park. It’s kind of weird. There’s like, some stones running through in a river that’s just random. There’s—

Nova K: And the paths are all messed up and like they don’t really go anywhere.  There’s a part of the path that’s even broken.

Echo: It’s like a little forgotten haven out here.

Nova K: Yeah. It felt like anything like positive would be just circling around, but not inside the park.

Echo: Yeah.

Nova K: And there was a particularly warped dead tree that was really freaking weird.

Echo: Yeah, I mean like we had to gather our gear and go in the car for warmth, but like, we were sitting here looking at this and it’s eerie, it’s nighttime and I definitely have a feeling that we’re being watched

Nova K: Constantly.

Echo: Okay. Nova, we recorded some spooky footage of a deer, right?

Nova K: Absolutely.

Echo: I looked up and there was a young buck and he didn’t see me yet. I was sitting on the crossroads of the cemetery park path, next to this really creepy gnarled tree.

Like I said, we’re on site right now. I don’t see any deer anymore. And that is because, like, he saw me and he bounded around the path over there, and he went in front of you and James, and then he went.

Nova K: Across the entire park—

Echo: Across the entire field, and I looked away for 30 seconds, I swear. I looked back and this deer was just gone.

And what was really weird is my friend was—MouseRat was sitting next to me, and she was looking straight at the deer and it just vanished.

We have audio of that moment and we’re going to play it for you, but I want you, Nova, to describe your experience with the deer.

Nova K: When the deer looked at you two, I looked and saw the deer. So the deer moved forward towards our direction, got direct eyesight between me and James, looked—nodded at me, ran off across the park diagonally and jumped off the cliff, vanishing.

I ran down to where the cliff is and never saw them. The tracks end halfway down the cliff. And so they literally just vanished out of thin air. I went down the cliff, I went around the area and I didn’t see any more tracks.

Echo: That’s crazy.

Nova K: They stopped halfway on the ledge.

Echo: So folks, we saw a ghost deer, okay? We’re not saying the park’s haunted, but we are saying we saw a ghost deer. Yeah. So here we go folks. This is the eerie audio.

Echo (in graveyard): Okay? We’re in the graveyard right now, and this deer just came on in. Welcome to the space in between, he says.

It’s really interesting. Deer are psychopomps. They guard the liminal spaces, they say. This is a young buck. He sees me for sure. There are bodies here undiscovered. And the deer just disappeared.

I just want to point out, like, I don’t see it anywhere. Like, I turned the camera for 30 seconds. That’s creepy.

What was really eerie to me is if you hear the people in the background talking, did you hear the people in the background talking, in the beginning? There was no one there talking.

Nova K: Didn’t sound like anybody I knew know.

And it also didn’t sound like me and James.

Echo: Yeah, you were across the park. There’s no way my phone is that good to pick up your audio. , You were on the other side of the park. I could barely even see you. Muskrat was quiet next to me. You hear her talk at the end of the video, but who are the two male voices having a conversation in the background?

That’s what I want to know. So that’s my spooky eerie footage, folks. And you can find us on Underground Echo at YouTube. This is Underground Echo. I’m Echo.

Nova K: I’m Nova K.

Echo: And we are here on location recording about Cemetery Park in Springfield, Oregon. A small forgotten haven for the dead. You know, there are still bodies in this park.

Nova K: That’s crazy.

Echo: And they don’t know how many.

Nova K: But there was like 12 headstones.

Echo: There’s 14 names on the headstones. So sometimes people shared graves with small children and stuff like that. That was really common. (Oh.) Because like it cost a lot to bury someone. Like say your family died of cholera and you lost three kids at once. You might reduce the cost by getting one headstone.

Nova K: That’s fair.

Echo: Yeah. And set the bodies next to each other.

Nova K: Okay. And there’s still more of a mystery that may not have headstones.

Echo: What we can account for in the cemetery is 21 bodies, which is not a big amount, but it’s not a big park.

Nova K: It really is not a big park.

Echo: I’m going to tell you a little bit about the history of this park. It was originally the burying place of Elias Briggs, which is really interesting. His children, his first children, I think it was a boy and a girl, and he buried those two children in a private cemetery and then donated it to be a public cemetery so that it would be the town cemetery, right?

Nova K: Right.

Echo: And Elias Briggs died at Oregon State Hospital and was buried on that land—the founder of Springfield.

Nova K: Really?

Echo: Yeah. So then fast forward a little, that was like 1852. We’re in 1913. Now, right, I want you to imagine being a family in Springfield, folks in 1913. I’m going to describe it to you, someone you loved, perhaps your mother, your husband, or your child has been buried for years, maybe decades, even.

And when you receive notice that you have 60 days to remove the remains from a cemetery for a family, in 1913, that demand could have been devastating. First, there was the financial burden. Exhuming remains arranging transportation, purchasing another burial plot, and paying for internment, which is putting the body back in the ground could require money a working-class family just simply didn’t have.

And unlike today, many families have limited access to automobiles. It was like a horse and buggy challenge. Okay? Then there was another emotional burden, right? Burial is supposed to represent a final resting place. Families had already endured the death, right?

They’ve already endured the loss. The grief, the funeral, and now the government was effectively asking them to disturb that resting place and go through part of the burial process again. What about families who had moved away? Those who had never received the notices? ‘Cause we know the government’s great about that.

Children who’d grown up and left Oregon, people whose relatives had died themselves, who would speak for the dead when there was nobody left to claim them? Well, we are here today with Nova K to help the dead speak, and that is part of what this episode is about, is giving the dead a voice.

That’s where this stops being simply a spooky story about an old cemetery and becomes a real-life horror, becomes a story about grief, economic inequality, public responsibility, and the people who fall through the cracks even after death.

Nova K: That’s so terrible.

Echo: It’s true, though. What do you think should be the community response?

Nova K: I think the whole community should come together and not have to pay charges. Like if no one had to to be able to move their bodies, everyone would come forth.

Echo: When does a cemetery stop being a cemetery? When the headstones disappear? When the fences come down?

Nova K: When the bodies are all moved.

Echo: Oh, what about when they plant grass, install benches, and just call it a park? Ha.

Nova K: Nope, because then the dead still lay there.

Echo: Does it remain a cemetery? As long as someone is still buried beneath it? That’s a question we’re sitting with.

We tend to think a burial is a promise. We lay someone to rest with the understanding that their remains will be treated with dignity, that their final resting place will be respected.

But what happens when the people who made that promise are gone? Does the promise expire with them? I would argue that it doesn’t.

And the community’s responsibility goes beyond maintaining a memorial or mowing the grass, and includes preserving burial records, protecting known and potentially unmarked graves from necessary and unnecessary disturbances, being transparent about the site’s history and making reasonable efforts to identify the people buried there.

It also means consulting descendants in culturally connected communities when decisions affect burial grounds. But I think there’s an actual ethical responsibility that goes even deeper because people buried at Cemetery Park weren’t always historical figures.

They were somebody’s family, someone’s child, someone’s entire world.

Do you think it’s enough to just have a memorial park? I mean, like we have 12 surviving headstones, bearing 14 names, but we don’t know how many people may still be buried here.

Nova, what does a name represent psychologically and what happens when even that last connection to someone’s identity disappears?

Nova K: Take away their name, you take away their identity to the world. Therefore, you take away their tie to the world. But if you disturb them, you hurt them, and take their name, they may not be able to leave this world and pass on to the next.

Echo: Something folks that you’re going to want to tune in for next week is we’re going to be talking to the Spoopy Squad, the ESPI, paranormal investigators of Eugene Springfield area, and we are privileged enough to get to actually go on one of their ghost hunts with them.

We got some spooky footage and you’re going to want to tune in and hear what the psychic has to say about life after death. I think it’s really interesting. So join us next week for Underground Echo Spooktacular. 

Presenter: The other KEPW programs collaborating on the Spooktacular include The Polarity Project, Transcendence (every Sunday at 3 p.m.) and The Other Side of Out There, with James Otter (Sundays at 9 p.m.) You can hear Underground Echo every Wednesday at 6 on KEPW 97.3, Eugene PeaceWorks Community Radio.